Beyond the Individual: Reframing Mental Health Crisis as Relational Through Feminist Ethics of Care and Family Caregivers’ Voices

Mental health crises are predominantly conceptualized as individualized events defined by biomedical symptoms and risk thresholds, a framing that systematically marginalizes family caregivers’ experiences. Drawing on feminist ethics of care, this qualitative study reframes mental health crisis as a relational phenomenon constituted within caregiving relationships. Based on in-depth interviews with 19 family caregivers in Taiwan, this study explores how caregivers understand, experience, and navigate mental health crises that are often not recognized as legitimate targets of intervention. Thematic analysis identifies four interrelated relational dimensions of crisis: protective vigilance, affective conflict, loss of connection, and destabilized relational system. These dimensions reveal how crises unfold not only within individuals but across relational and emotional contexts, producing ethical distress and invisible labor for caregivers. By centering caregivers’ lived experiences, this study challenges dominant, individualized crisis paradigms and contributes a care-ethical framework for understanding mental health crises as relational ruptures rather than isolated individual mental breakdowns. The study contributes to feminist and mental health social work by adopting a relational lens of mental health crisis. Social work can more effectively respond to mental health crisis in ways that honor both autonomy and care, not as opposing values, but as mutually constituted within relationships.